Boss of the Insane Music label, member of many bands such as Cortex, Human Dance, Human Flesh, I Scream, Japanese Genius, Ornament & Crime Arkhestra, Pseudo Code, Sic, Subject, etc, Alain Neffe during all the 80s has been damn busy and EE Tapes is keeping on reissuing his music digging into the archives to bring us classic and unreleased tracks. THE ( ALMOST) INSANELY HAPPY EP is the second 7" EP compilation dedicated to Insane Music and it contains three tracks by Subject and three by Human Dance of which three are unreleased. Subject were in balance from pop intuitions, wave atmospheres and minimal approaches to sound where bass guitar, guitar and a rhythm box were the core of the sound which on the dreamy dramatic "L'ultima storia" sees Mirella Brunello joining Alain Neffe and Daniel Malempre to sing in Italian a lyric about a lost love. Human Dance were less wave and a bit more ironic. Their "Jethro, C'Est Trop !!" has a flute part recalling the Jethro Tull and "Magikal Hystery Sour (The Beatles Were Not So Bad, After All !!)" sounds like a minimal pop soundtrack with clean guitars, organ and drum machine in evidence. "The Desert Call" experiment a little with middle eastern atmospheres and reverbs. This is a nice EP available in 250 copies of which the first 85 are hand-numbered and have two extra photographs, from a series of nine.

The Rope's bio says that they play 'an atmospheric, yet driving style of music influenced by some of the darker post-punk bands of the late 70s and early 80s,' and I'd say that is a pretty dead-on description of the music on this CD. The Rope's music could easily draw comparisons with many bands from that era, but lean more to the more popular Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, The Cult, and sometimes even Psychedelic Furs because of Jesse Hagon's vocals.

The Rope opens with 2 very strong, tom- and bass-driven tracks, 'Silence' and 'Water to Wine.' 'Silence' has some nice atmospheric guitar melodies that run throughout which sound like a cross between Billy Duffy and Peter Koppes. 'Water to Wine' is a more 'in your face' track with nice synth leads and a four-on-the-floor chorus with strong hooks and vocal melodies, too. Because of the first two tracks, I predict this CD will spend a lot of time in my car accompanying me on fast drives with the top down. 'Jericho' is another very strong, driving track, a la Sisters, but The Rope breaks up the momentum and brings the mood down, but not the tempo, with the ballad 'Marie' as track 3. The CD ends with a live version of the song 'Eyes,' which reminds me of 'Maryanne' by Sisters of Mercy as if sung by Richard Butler.

I am enjoying this micro-trend of newer bands like Bravery, She Wants Revenge, Hypernova and The Rope that sound like they were spawned from the early 80s English post-punk and death rock scene. This is a very strong first release by The Rope and look forward to hearing more new music

Omega Lithium is a goth-metal croatian outfit, and this new record is, formally speaking, an exercise on the essential lines of this genre: good riffs, a danceable main line with hooklines.
"Colossus" opens the album with a solemn gothic intro ending in a classic metal riff until synth and vocal lines takes the scene. "Time of Change" is a well written track but revealing the influence of this band: a metal riff, a mid tempo and a quite seductive female vocal lines. The title-track reveal a quite cleaner musical direction with the use an almost new wave synth. This track mark the second half of the album that is more synth driven, "Salvation Refused" is a good balance of pop lines and power guitar while "I am God" uses also a male chorus to reveal the main influence of this band. "Cut Forget" is the most metal oriented track of this album with screamed vocals. "Pjesma" is a ballad that close the dance.
This is an album with nothing new to offer but brings some nice times hearing it.

Taiga, by Richard Coker, is a solo, acoustic folk album featuring 12 songs recorded live by Richard in his studio. This is his first solo release after playing in various goth bands for the last 20 years. The vocal and guitar performances are well done and competently recorded. The songs have are no choruses or hooks to grab on to, and the songs end abruptly. The vocal melodies are very similar from song-to-song making it hard to distinguish one song from the next. In Richard's notes on the album he states that, 'the lyrics are heavily steeped in existentialism and French Symbolist poetry.' The album is dense with lyrics and there are lots of songs about the human condition. But the lyrics often seem very heavy-handed, preachy, sometimes silly and cliché. If you like folk music, or are a Ren-head you'll probably enjoy this, but overall Taiga is monotonous and hard to listen to.

Evil Walks is a lumbering, dirge-like, post-punk/black metal album that suffers from an overall uneven mix that is often muffled and lacking in clarity. On the first track, "There Is A Certain Smell Attractive To Wolves," the female spoken word performance falls victim to the unclear mix and you can't tell that she is talking about being lost on a ship and hearing the howling of wolves and doesn't want to die. This is common to all the spoken word performances; all the frequencies that make a voice intelligible have been sucked out, making it difficult to understand. Each song thereafter mostly lumbers along, unremarkable and dirge-like with unintelligible, super-distorted, guttural vocals. But, there are some interesting moments, and the band does seems to be trying create something interesting. This is especially apparent in the almost 12-minute long epic, 'The City Of Lost Girls.' The instrumental, with droning guitar, bass and strings playing off a piano melody, screams of terror, and soundbites from news stories about the Mexico-Texas border violence, is the most interesting track on the album.

Lyrically Evil Walks incorporates all the typical black metal and doom themes including serpents, darkness, judgement, fires and burning, isolation, suicide, and railing against society. But there are some cool lyrics and imagery that go beyond the that standard fare like, ' I dreamed of you last night with a thousand knives in your back ' you looked so surprised and the points , they were so sharp,' from "There Is A Certain Smell Attractive To Wolves." And 'Me And You And A Can Of Gasoline' and 'Evil Walks' tell some good stories. However, the vocals are so buried and distorted you have to have the booklet handy while listening to get this.

If Evil Walks was remixed and remastered to fix the overall balance and clarity, and the processing on the lead vocals dialing back, this album might have a slightly Skinny Puppy vibe.